Friday Fireworks With Holyrood PR

HALF DUCK, HALF RABBIT (Aimee)

Believe it or not, the title of this high five is relatively normal to what it could have been had I been able to work out what other creatures I was looking at whilst strolling through an amateur taxidermist’s creations.

Andrew Lancaster, a self taught taxidermist has been creating his unusual looking stuffed animals for two years and is entirely self taught. He uses body parts from road kill in his homeland New Zealand and has created quite a stir with his animal hybrids. There is a divide in opinion with some branding him sick and others praising his originality. His creations can be bought on Trade Me – the Kiwi equivalent of Craigslist. Buyers can expect to choose from a selection of birds, pheasants, rats, ferrets and has even found possum babies.

Whether it’s to your liking or not, after I read the article and saw he had a Facebook page with 241 members I decided to join and his group now has 466 members!

QRIP – OR IMMORTALTY THROUGH A DIGITAL CODE (Scott)

By now we’ve all seen QR codes – those we squares full of black and white pixels – on property schedules, newspaper and magazine adverts and all sorts of other clever places.

By downloading a free scanner for your phone, every time you see one of these codes, you point your phone at it – and voila, you will be taken to an interesting web page full of all sorts of useful information.

Now some smart company is using the codes on headstones – scan it and get a full, web-based history of the life they lived, before shuffling off this mortal coil.

THE BEST THREADS FOR GAMERS AND GEEKS (Adrian)

It can be difficult to find clothing that complements your interests if you’re a geek or a gamer. Aside from a few nerdy mash-up T-shirts to choose from, there’s little else in the clothes world to suit the legions of fans who spend hours on video games or online geek pursuits.

Thankfully, there’s one outlets in the interwebs that has provided some well-deserved relief for such would-be customers – the fantastic online clothing apparel shop Jinx.com. Want a World of Warcraft hoodie? There’s an entire range of them on their stock list. Desperately need a Minecraft hat? Yep, they’ve got those too.

By far the best, though, are the Portal 2-themed socks. They’re unfortunately only available in women’s styles at the moment, but they’re still phenomenal.

FINE ART (Aimee)

The adjective to describe this art form refers to the dainty, delicate nature of Willard Wigan’s artwork which was crafted from specks of gold and balanced on the end of an eyelash. He created a sculpture of Olympic diver Tom Daley which is amazingly the size of a single blood cell. Unsurprisingly it is the artist’s smallest piece of work to date which he completed by using a hair from the leg of a fruit fly as a brush in his Birmingham studio. At times I struggle to get my nail varnish on without coating my fingertips so this guy’s ability to keep his hands steady is beyond impressive. Also shown by the Daily Mail is a house crafted to fit on the head of a match.